I felt the shock of the impact to his skull transmitted to the handle of my sword, and I felt the crushing of his skull as it gave way and caved in. I pulled back for another blow and the great ape crumpled forward on its face to the ground. I leapt over the body to my right and stood at its shoulder and brought my weapon down again, this time across the base of his neck, shattering the vertebrae connecting the shoulder and head, separating the thing’s spinal cord.
I took a breath. It was dead. Very, very dead. I scanned the area for more threats and not seeing any, I turned back to find Aeyli-ah. Had she kept running away as I had hoped? Was she running for safety?
No, she was running toward me. She was still maybe 20 yards from where I stood, and when she reached me, she threw herself into my arms! Even though she was light in the reduced gravity, she knocked me off my feet and landed on top of me.
The girl straddled my chest and then bent down and kissed me hard. “Mark, Mark, Mark,” she babbled as she covered my face with kisses. Not only that, but I could feel her grinding her sex against my ribs and when she rose up, I saw that her nipples stood out firmly. It was clear that she was highly aroused and that if the opportunity had been there, she would have had me take her then and there.
As it was, my own mood didn’t exactly match hers. Yes, I was thrilled to have saved my beloved, but I had never killed anything before in my entire life. I wasn’t a hunter. The fact that I had just defeated one of the biggest predators on the planet of Barsoom was a matter of instinct cultivated by training in a martial arts gym, not on the battle field.
I grabbed my princess as she continued to writhe and kiss my neck and face and I pulled her into a tight hug to contain her. I think that she didn’t even know what she was doing. I breathed heavily and my heart pounded. I lay next to the dead body of a great white ape and my lover lay on top of me. I continued to hold her until I felt her begin to relax in my arms. She trembled with emotions that she wasn’t in control of, but eventually she began to calm down.
Afterward, I sat us both up and then finally stood. We stood together and looked down at the body of the thing that would have killed us.
Aeyli-ah said, “Mark, My King, I have never seen anything like that before! You killed it with one blow. When it reached for you, I thought it was over. I knew that you could never escape its crushing grasp… and in the next instant I saw it fall headlong, dead at your feet . And then your sword came down again and would have separated its head if the blade had been sharp. Mark, you killed a great ape! By yourself! With a stick! Yes, I saw you do it, and I know how it was done, but I have never heard of anything like this, ever! Maybe the Warlord could have done it, but by all accounts of his swordsmanship, he probably would have run his sword through its breast and would have fought for an hour waiting for the thing to finally die. Oh, Mark, there is more you that you have to know before we reach the settlement, but first we need to handle this. Give me your knife.”
I handed Aeyli-ah my knife and stepped back as she went to work skinning the animal. We weren’t after the meat, so she didn’t gut the thing, but the pelt seemed to be a great prize. I heard her say, mostly to herself, “We will need many sleeping furs… many. This will be mine.”
I forced myself to watch as she expertly cut here and there and peeled the fur from the thing as if it were fruit. I thought about how she again said something about needing to tell me something important. This was maybe the third time that she had mentioned it, but she always said that it would be discussed later and changed the subject. There was always a hesitation to bring it up and a sense of a long held secret. It felt as if she’d kept a secret promise for a long time, but for some reason felt that she had to eventually tell me. And, she seemed to indicate that it was important that she tell me before we reached the settlement she was taking us to.
The work of skinning my kill and collecting its pelt went on for at least an hour. She was very deft with the knife, but she worked very carefully, removing the enormous fur in a single piece. When she had it off, I helped hold it as she used the very sharp knife to scrape the inside of the hide so smooth that it would dry very quickly without a single hint of flesh left on it. In the end, the thing was about seven feet tall and nearly eighteen feet wide, with another four feet of legs and arms at each side. Aeyli-ah folded and rolled the thing into a large bundle and then handed it to me.
I held the hide as she faced me and said, “My prince, you asked about a token. The custom is for two: one for day and one for night… if the girl has a very brave mate. My Lord, you have given me the jewel for daytime. The custom is for a hunter to give the fur of his first kill after their betrothal to his mate for her bed. It’s a sign of his protection.”
She looked at the ground and shifted on her pretty feet shyly.
I laughed and shook out the giant fur to its full size and said, “Who’s the stupid one now, my Barsoomian queen?” and I wrapped the fur around us both and pushed her to the ground. I rolled us up in the great sheet and caressed and kissed her. I joked, “Oh, look, here’s your bed now! Whatever shall we do? I have given you your token, what do you have for me?”
Aeyli-ah laughed in my arms, but then pushed me away and pulled us both from the tangle of the large fur.
She said, “I give you myself, oh stupid prince! And, as to what we do, though I could long to have you break in my new sleeping furs, I long even more to get away from this rotting corpse!”
I sprang from the ground and helped her fold the fur as we laughed.
I started to walk back toward the ruins, but she stopped me and said, “Wait. Come back. There’s still time. Let’s go this way and I’ll show you a secret place.”
She led me back into the woods away from the ruins.
Aeyli-ah held my hand and pulled me quickly along through the woods. We went several miles and the forest grew thicker as we went. I had no idea where we might be going, and I could tell that this wasn’t ‘the secret’ that she was so reluctant to share with me.
We kept going. Aeyli-ah was obviously excited to show me something that she thought was very special. And, it was. When we reached our destination, we stood at a pool of water, surrounded by trees and well hidden, about 20 feet across. A small clump of rocks was at one end and a stream bubbled into the pool.
Aeyli-ah whispered as if she didn’t want anyone to overhear, “Lover, we can bathe here!”
That sounded great to me. I was used to bathing daily, but it had been several days.
She said, “Mark, have you ever seen so much water? Enough to stand in? It goes up to my neck!” she said excitedly.
We quickly laid aside our belts and fruit and the fur and stepped into the water together. It was a little cooler than the air, and it felt wonderful. We washed, and then washed each other. After a bit we sat near the rocks in the shallows and she lay against me and we talked.
I said, “Aeyli-ah, my world is so poor and sad in so many ways compared to this one, but three-quarters of it is covered with water. Great oceans thousands of miles across and large lakes and rivers a mile wide, or even more. Forests and jungles a thousand miles across, and deserts just as big. But this is better than all of it.”
She snuggled under my arm and smiled.
I said, “Princess, could we live here? Could we build a shelter, a little house, and make this place safe, and just live here together? Bathing every day and eating fruit?”